US Airways is offering a 100% bonus on shared miles (miles transferred between accounts) through October 15.

You can earn up to 50,000 bonus miles with the offer, which should appear instantly with the transfer.

Share miles bonus

For a limited time, when you share miles, the recipient will get a 100% bonus – up to 50,000 miles. Just share your miles by October 15, 2013.

• Share 10,000 miles, give 20,000 miles
• Share 30,000 miles, give 60,000 miles
• Share 50,000 miles, give 100,000 miles

Transfers are available in 1000 mile increments, and each 1000 miles transferred — up to 50,000 — earns a corresponding 1000 mile bonus transferred into the recipient’s account.

The cost for this is “$0.01 per mile plus a processing fee of $30 and a tax recovery charge of 7.5%” — transferring 50,000 miles from one account to another will deposit 100,000 in that account at a cost of $567.50.

Since that’s a net increase of 50,000 miles you’re buying miles at $0.01135 per mile. At that price I’m a buyer.

What I love about US Airways is awards in premium cabins on Star Alliance partner airlines, and a generally reasonable award chart — in some cases downright generous such as 90,000 miles roundtrip between the US and Hong Kong, and 110,000 miles roundtrip between the US and Australia or Africa. Here’s my guide to using US Airways miles to book Star Alliance awards.

What I don’t love about US Airways is that there are no one-way awards at half the cost of round trip, and no changes to an award ticket once travel has commenced. In addition, US Airways has had challenges ‘seeing’ some Lufthansa award space and even some ANA award space, my sense is that this is the result of a technical glitch that US Airways has not at all seemed eager to solve (“a feature not a bug”).

Since it’s now been nearly four years since they increased prices across the board on their award chart, I wouldn’t be surprised to see another round of increases — held in check only by the uncertainty surrounding the American Airlines merger — in the near or medium-term. I’m not sure I’d be truly stocking up on US Airways miles.

It’s still hard to go wrong at less than 1.2 cents apiece. So I intend to take advantage of this offer. This is a great way to buy miles in conjunction with a friend (you transfer to them and they back to you) as well as a great way to clean out orphan accounts.

Note, if you need an account with a friend of family member to transfer miles back and forth set that account up today. The rules say

Please note that Dividend Miles accounts less than 12 days old are not permitted to Buy, Share or Gift miles.

Fortunately the promotion lasts longer than 12 days, but only a few days longer.

(HT: Len M.)

---

You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. Don’t miss out!